NOLTE’S WEIRD LIFE
Actor bares his soul in affecting memoir that grabs your attention right away
Rebel: My Life Outside the Lines Nick Nolte Morrow
How weird is Nick Nolte? Weird enough that on a 1991 Good Morning America segment he announced that he had scheduled a “testicle tuck.” This lie cut short his interview, but Nolte chose to repeat it in the first sentence of Rebel. “I’ve tried not to fudge,” he writes, attributing his lying to shyness and the “false high” of fame. Or, “maybe I just rebel with a little lie.”
Whatever the reason, Nolte has our attention, and he wants very much to tell his story.
Postwar America was full of lies. For example, the Second World War was the “good” war, a lie Nolte’s father demolished when he returned from the Pacific theatre “a shell of a man” damaged by “the horrors of what humankind is capable of.” It’s a transformation that’s haunted Nolte all his life. Nolte’s independent and imaginative mother rebelled against the lie of the happy housewife by working as a buyer for department stores. But at home she raged against the sexism she suffered. She also drank and took pills and didn’t hesitate to give her young son “a vitamin” that was actually the upper Dexedrine on those mornings when he didn’t want to go to school. This might help explain Nolte’s later trouble with drugs and alcohol. Nolte’s mother fed his rebelliousness, and his father’s deep silences and secluding habits formed a reallife model for many of the male characters Nolte would later play in films.
Nolte loved his parents, but life in Nebraska stifled his craving for “every kind of experience.”
He flunked out of college, then, while working construction, was discovered in true Hollywood fashion by agent Henry Willson, later notorious for interviewing the handsome men he had discovered while “wearing only a silk dressing gown.” When this happened to Nolte, he “awkwardly excused” himself and put aside his movie-star dreams. Nolte, though, had discovered acting, and after years of working in summer stock and regional theatre, his big break came in 1976 when he starred in the ABC miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man. After that, Hollywood.
Rebel’s tone is clean, inviting and forthright; the memoir is cumulative instead of meditative. Though known for his excesses, Nolte likes to be in control, but he also comes across as modest and generous.
Many know Nolte only through his 2002 mug shot after he was arrested for driving under the influence. In 10 years, he had gone from being People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive to looking like king of the dumpster divers. Dwelling on this image is a mistake considering all the great Nolte movies we could be watching, especially Affliction, in which Nolte plays Wade Whitehouse, a man who, like Nolte, was “afflicted by his father.”
And now we have Rebel: My Life Outside the Lines, playing at a bookstore near you. Touching, funny in parts, full of the excesses postwar America readily supplied, and, hopefully, truthful. Pick it up.